You’re in a rut!

Or at least, it’s very likely. Because we all are. We auto-pilot so many things; we have to or we’d go insane. We simply have too many things to do to consciously think our way through each and every one. But it’s worth adjusting that mental auto-pilot on occasion!

Let me give an example from my own life: My oldest daughter takes karate lessons. For a few reasons, I chose a school that isn’t conveniently located near our home (it’s awesome in every other way). When I was first taking the Beansprout to her lessons, I followed my GPS through the unfamiliar route until it became familiar enough to stop using the device; 2 or 3 trips maybe. The trip took a little over 20 minutes each way (yes, that’s a ridiculous commute for karate lessons, and yes, it’s absolutely worth it to everyone involved).

Ever since, I’ve been taking that same route. I never really thought about it. But one day, I happened to have to go somewhere that was very close to the karate school for unrelated reasons. I plugged that address into my GPS, and lo and behold the trip took barely over 10 minutes; it was mostly along one freeway, and the place was right off an exit. And sure enough, that place happened to be only a few blocks from the karate school. It turns out that the exit had been closed for construction for just about exactly the few weeks when I was first taking the Beansprout to her lessons; as a result, GPS was re-routing us through back roads that took nearly double the time. But I was on auto-pilot, and never really thought about it.

Once I had reason to re-examine the route, it turns out there was a way better one. I was already willing to take the longer route, so getting a shorter one was all upside!

The thing is, there are probably dozens of instances in our lives where we’re doing something on auto-pilot because we’ve done it that way for a while and haven’t really thought about it. And it’s true that if we try to actively, consciously think about every little decision in our day to day lives we’ll go mad from stress.

But pick one! Just today, pick one thing you do on auto-pilot and examine it. Your route to work? What you eat for lunch? A piece of software you use for a certain task? Your brand of deodorant? Anything! Just pick something and give some serious thought to whether or not there’s a better way. There might not be anything major to be gained, but then again there might be. Or there might be a minor improvement, and single drops of water make The River, after all. So pick something and improve it.

Then do it again tomorrow.

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are ‘It might have been.’ – Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

(By the way, if you’ve never read it: you should.)

We play in the land of “What If” frequently, but almost always in reverse. We let our imaginations wander to what could have been, but so rarely even glance in the direction of what could still be.

Let’s say you make $50,000/year right now. If it could lead you to being able to make $75,000/year in five years, would you switch to a $30,000/year role right now?

That’s a good deal. People should take it more often – and the deal is there to take. Why don’t they?

The deal is there because there are lots of people who could very reasonably make more money by switching industries or learning a new skill, but they’d have to “start at the bottom.” Lots of people won’t do that, for a variety of reasons. The two biggest, I think, are these:

1. Status matters to people. I think a lot of people would trade being being rich for being perfectly perceived as rich/high status by 100% of the population. Even the temporary loss of status is too much for some people to bear.
2. People often can’t afford to have their income decrease even a little. We have a terrible tendency to let our expenditures rise exactly to (or even past!) our level of income, such that a minor decrease is incredibly difficult to bear.

As much as possible, be mobile. That can mean a lot of things. It can mean not anchoring yourself to a physical location, but it can also mean being economically mobile. If you live cheaply but have lots of savings, you can afford to make more money in the long run.

I admit, this is a mistake I’ve made in the past. When the oil industry was booming in North Dakota between 2006 and 2012, I thought about how I could have packed up and jumped on it and made a lot of money, but I wasn’t mobile enough.

Stay flexible, and consider what can be, instead of what might have been.

“I think a plan is just a list of things that don’t happen.” – Mr. Parker, The Way of the Gun (2000)

It’s good to have a plan. It’s also good to be prepared to deviate from it – or for it to deviate from you. When you think about a plan, think about the difference between cooking and baking.

When you bake, you need to be pretty exact. You can’t just add flour, water, eggs, etc. in any combination you like, adjusting as you go. If you don’t get it exactly right, you won’t end up with a cake – you’ll end up with a brick or a mess. Maybe a messy brick. But definitely not a cake.

Cooking is different – more art than science. When I’m cooking, I start with a basic plan, sure. But I can adjust as I go, add things I feel like, compensate for earlier mistakes. The end result is almost always delicious, even if it often ends up different from what I envisioned in the beginning. Sometimes I mess up a meal to the point where it isn’t good, but far more often I end up with something new and exciting that my family loves.

When you make a plan, think of it like cooking, not like baking. It’s good to have a plan to start – you need to have some vision to begin. But you can adjust, be flexible, roll with punches, add new ideas. When you bake, you can’t do that – if you realize halfway through the baking process that you forgot an ingredient when you put that cake in the oven 15 minutes ago, there’s no coming back. That’s why I don’t bake.

Be prepared to make changes as you need to. Stay flexible. You’re probably in the midst of one or more plans right now – plans for this week or month, maybe 5-year plans, or maybe even plans you’ve made for your life. When was the last time you sat back, evaluated your progress so far, and made a course correction? 5-year plans are great as visions. But 3 years in, you’re hopefully 3 years wiser than you were, and it’s worth it to take that new experience into account and adjust.

It’s more important that the end result is delicious than that it’s what you envisioned when you started.

I want to take you through a thought experiment.

Let’s say I offered you one million dollars to shovel elephant feces for eight hours. In the hot sun. With no breaks. Would you do it? I certainly would – only eight hours, for a million bucks? That’s a great deal. Maybe you wouldn’t, but I’ll assume you would, if you’re able. If you’re physically unable to do this task, you can substitute any equally-unpleasant task that you’re physically capable of performing; doesn’t matter for the purpose of this hypothetical.

Okay, so you’d do Unpleasant Task X for eight hours for a million bucks, cool. How about for a week? 7 days straight, eight-hour days, no breaks. But you get a million bucks. Still with me?

How about a month? 31 straight days, eight hours a day– no, you know what, let’s make it 12 hours a day. 12 hours a day for 31 days, no breaks. But you get a million dollars. Maybe fewer people would do this. It still sounds like a great deal to me, but everybody isn’t me.

How about a year? A full year, 365 days straight. 12 hour days. No days off, no breaks. And to make it even harder – you don’t get the money until the year is done, AND if you miss even a minute you lose. If you’re 2 minutes late on the last day, you get zero. Would you still do it?

What if I made it ten million? Fifty million?

The point of this experiment is to realize that different people have different thresholds for what costs they’re willing to pay for what benefits. Some people wouldn’t even do the scenario as initially presented, and others would do even the last scenario. There might be a number that would make you do the year-long version that’s much higher than $50 million, or it might even be lower than a million.

Everything in life has a cost. Sometimes we pay too much attention to the cost and not enough attention to the benefit, and we end up not doing things that would actually be really great for us in the long run because we’re too focused on the short-term unpleasantness of that cost. Other times we focus too much on the benefit and not enough on the cost, and end up sacrificing too much to get something we think we wanted. It’s good to spend some time balancing the scales. Take some inventory of the things you’re working towards right now – are you paying too high a cost? And what things have you chosen not to strive for because the cost is scary – would the benefit outweigh it?

Take that step back and look at the whole picture. You’ll be better off for it.

When I was 15 or so, my father called me outside one day and said “the oil in your mother’s car needs to be changed. Come on, you’re gonna help me.”

We spent all day on it. First we drove her car up onto ramps so we could more easily get underneath. We opened it up and let the oil start to drain out into the pan, and while that was happening we looked at the cap to see the specified kind of oil for the car. We drove dad’s car to the store and bought the oil, as well as a new filter. We got back and crawled under the car again to close it up, and then spent time both under the car and under the hood, changing the oil filter, replacing the oil, checking with the dipstick, all that. Then we carefully sealed up the old oil and took it to be disposed of properly, driving mom’s car in the process so that he could make sure everything was okay before giving it back to her.

When we were all done, he asked me: “What did I teach you today?”

I said that he’d taught me how to change the oil on a car.

He said: “No! I taught you the value of twenty dollars! [$20 was the going rate for an oil change at the time.] It’s good to know how to do that stuff yourself in case you need to, but you should almost never do it. Someone else could have done that in ten minutes for twenty bucks, and I could have made more than that doing something else. Now that you saw what a pain in the ass it was, you’ll appreciate spending twenty bucks not to do it.”

He’s a wise man, my father. He intuitively understood a lot of economic concepts (like opportunity cost/comparative advantage!) without any formal study in the subject. I remember another of his lessons: Don’t complain about gas prices. He said “A gallon of gas might cost three dollars. But my car can go fifteen miles on a gallon. Go outside and push my car fifteen miles – hell, just walk fifteen miles – and then tell me you wouldn’t rather have paid three dollars to drive.” He understood next best alternatives, too.

At the core of these lessons is a philosophy for life that can lead to a lot of success: Seek out the win/win scenario.

Paying someone else to change your oil is (for most people) a win/win scenario. You gain time that is worth more than the cost of the service, and the people specializing in that service make a living. Most people make money by making other people’s lives better. We live in an age of miracles and wonders. It’s good to remember it, and be grateful.

Today I’m going to share with you a secret for getting more value than you pay for when hiring someone.

All else being equal, someone with more knowledge and/or skills (i.e. someone able to complete more tasks) is more valuable to you than someone with less knowledge or fewer skills. If you have Applicant A and Applicant B, and they’re identical in all ways except Applicant A can make a spreadsheet and Applicant B can’t, then Applicant A is a better hire for the same money.

Now, let’s do a little math. Let’s say that your time at your company is worth $100/hour. Anything you do needs to, on average, be generating that much revenue or you’re making bad business decisions. You shouldn’t wash the windows at your own company, because you could hire someone to do that for $15/hour, and you could spend the same hour making $100, and thus you’d be $85 richer by hiring someone else.

Now let’s assume that you need to hire someone to do 5 different tasks, and it’s reasonable to roll them into a single position. While you could do the tasks yourself, it wouldn’t be efficient for you to do so, for the reason described above. You know these tasks very well, so you’re hoping to find someone who could do them at least close to as well as you could. You find such a person, and the market rate for them seems to be $60,000/year. Let’s call this person Amy for ease of the hypothetical.

Simple so far, and I probably haven’t said anything you didn’t already know. But now, let me get to the secret.

Let’s say instead of that person that knows those 5 tasks, you find someone who doesn’t know them. Call them Evelyn. Evelyn is in every way identical to Amy, except she doesn’t know those 5 tasks. But she has the same level of general intelligence, character, initiative, etc. So clearly she’s capable of the tasks, she just doesn’t have the knowledge. Because she knows fewer skills, perhaps because she’s earlier in her career than Amy, the market rate for her employment is only $40,000/year.

You are, personally, an expert on those 5 tasks. You could teach them to Evelyn, it would just take time. Many people think they should hire Amy – but if you can teach those skills to Evelyn, you’d be crazy not to hire her.

Why? Well, consider: If you can teach all 5 tasks to Evelyn in 100 hours, you’ve spent $10,000 of your own to do so – but now you have someone working for you for $40,000 a year who is worth $60,000. You’re $10,000 richer in the first year alone, and every year after you’re $20,000 richer. It involved a little more up-front investment of time and energy, but the end result was huge value.

“But what if Evelyn takes these new skills and then leaves for a $60,000/year offer?” Guess what – she will. Eventually. But she won’t do it in the first year, or probably even in the second or third, if you’re treating her well. And if she leaves after the third year, you’ve made $50,000 hiring Evelyn over hiring Amy, and you can do the same thing again with your next hire. And of course there are a hundred other confounding factors that could change that – a raise of $5,000 in her second year makes Evelyn very happy and still keeps her well below what you would have been paying for Amy. Plus, it should never be discounted that you get a lot of loyalty by investing in your people early. It pays dividends.

Why don’t more companies do this? Because this, despite its long-term value, is hard in the short term. You have to have foresight to make hires before they’re emergencies so you have time to train. You have to be willing to put the effort in to train someone. You have to be accepting of some risk. But these are the practices that build empires. And who doesn’t want a good deal on their empire?

I want to change your life.

I’m going to suggest an experimental course of action for you. It will be difficult for multiple reasons. The first reason it will be difficult is because when you first hear the suggestion, your initial reaction will be to believe you already do it. You don’t.

Here is the suggestion: Just for a day, I want you to believe that everyone that’s speaking to you is telling you the literal truth.

Now, this is a suggestion for your personal and professional life, not political. Don’t watch the news or a politician’s speech and try this, you’ll go mad.

But for the people you interact with personally – your loved ones, your co-workers, etc. Give them your radical trust.

You might think you do this, but almost no one does. When someone is mad at their spouse, and the spouse says “I don’t know what I did wrong,” often your inclination is to hear that sentence as “I don’t agree with you that my behavior was blameworthy; rather I think you’re being over-sensitive.” That, of course, would be a terrible thing to say to someone who is mad at you if your intent was to get them to not be. So when you hear that in your mind, you get even madder – how dare they imply that! But just as an experiment, mind you, consider how you might react if instead what you heard was:

“I don’t know what I did wrong.”

Literally, without sarcasm or ulterior motive. If you truly believed them when they said that, you might soften a bit, realize that they angered or upset you without meaning to, and would genuinely be eager to change their behavior if they knew what hurt you. You might then tell them how you feel and why, and they could realize what they’d done, apologize, and not do it again now that they know how it made you feel.

Imagine someone under you at work comes to you and says “I’m having a little bit of difficulty with this task.” You might be quick to think “Here we go, they’re trying to get out of having to do something, they want me to do half or more of it, or maybe assign it to someone else, what a lazy jerk.” But what if instead you forced yourself to hear:

“I’m having a little bit of difficulty with this task.”

If you gave them your radical trust, you might realize that they’re very eager to perform well, and that it takes a good amount of character to admit when you’re having difficulty and approach a superior about it, and in fact it shows dedication to improvement. If you give them the benefit of your experience to learn from, they could master this task and be that much more valuable to you going forward.

People will sometimes, of course, give you reason not to trust them. But just for today, wipe that slate clean – in fact, cleaner than it’s ever been, even when you first met them. Make a conscious, deliberate effort to clear away your assumptions and biases, and give them your radical trust anew (or for the first time). Take everyone today at their literal word. Don’t read anything into anyone’s statements.

See what it does for you. See if it changes your interactions for the better. And if it does, as I believe it will, try it again tomorrow.

Retail stores are closing at tremendous rates.

Whether its entire chains going under like Toys-R-Us or still-treading-water chains that are just closing lots of stores, the online shopping experience is crushing location-based retail. And for the most part I say – good riddance! For consumers this is pretty obviously a good thing.

But it got me thinking about the retail spaces I see vacant now. I drive by an old Toys-R-Us location pretty regularly. I see a closed-down Sears. There’s opportunity there.

Obviously any real estate is opportunity in some sense, but I was thinking about what you could do with those spaces that would require a minimal level of conversion. Sure, you could bulldoze the whole thing and build an apartment complex, but what could you do with those spaces mostly as-is?

There are many, many businesses that will be location-based for the foreseeable future. Consider a modern American mall. If the one in your town is anything like the ones near me (I’m from New Jersey, the Land of Malls) then it’s probably 75% filled with exactly the kinds of retail chains that online shopping is crushing. But that doesn’t have to be the case!

There are two categories of businesses that I almost never see in a mall, but they strike me as obvious choices. One category is businesses that sell items you want to try first. Take mattresses, for example. While lots of people buy cheap mattresses online, as soon as you get to the more expensive price points people really want to lay on one and make sure it’s comfortable before committing to the expense (or hassle of navigating even a free return policy). As a result, mattress stores are still very ubiquitous, but I never see them at a mall, even though the space is certainly sufficient. Maybe it’s an issue of price point – mall real estate could well be much more expensive than that lot on the interstate, but if malls are failing, surely eventually the price will equalize. Guitar (and other instrument) stores strike me as another like this – my musician friends often tell me that they wouldn’t buy an expensive instrument that they couldn’t play first. And so on.

The other category, of course, is services. You can’t order a haircut online. Amazon can’t deliver you braces (yet). Many dentists are in professional office parks – but would they see more traffic in a mall? (Currently – probably not. But malls at their historical height of popularity?)

I’ve also thought about ways traditional retail providers could keep up with the online shopping surge. Imagine traditional retail spaces not as stores, but as showrooms. You go to a clothing or makeup store and you can try on whatever you want, but if you like a product you just scan its tag with a convenient app on your smart phone, and it’s added to your Amazon cart. No transactions are made in the store – Amazon handles all fulfillment. The result is that customers can still try on clothes, see what makeup actually looks like on their skin tone, find out what that bath product actually smells like, etc., but stores don’t have to handle transactions, they have probably a tenth or less of the inventory management headache (they only have to re-order damaged product or samples that run out, not constantly re-stocking sold items) and thus need less space overall (or the same amount of space could hold a much greater variety of products for display). Theft would be far less of a concern – it’s easier to spot shoplifters when in theory no product should be leaving the store, even legitimately. And no cash on-site means far less potential for robberies as well (although malls inherently provide more safety in that respect as well).

So imagine a mall for the 21st century. You walk in and there are a variety of services on display – barber shops and dentists, massage parlors and painting studios. Fun things like Escape Rooms or even mini-movie-theaters. Mattress stores, guitar stores, and other things like it. Plus a dozen or more small retail showrooms for jewelry, makeup, candles, what have you – all with the app-based setup.

And of course, always the food court.

Thanks for coming to my pitch meeting!

I don’t think the movie theater experience will last much longer in America. While box office sales aren’t terrible, they’re definitely down significantly from their peak in the early 2000’s. We’re closer to mid-90’s levels now, and I think the trend will continue downward.

Options for watching at home are simply getting better. I love movies; I would definitely categorize myself as a “movie buff.” As a result, I have a pretty sweet home theater built in my basement. Projector, nice surround sound, all that. Even so, it’s amateur/hobbyist level stuff; I have some friends with way nicer setups. But even my amateur setup is awesome and makes my desire to go to the movies almost non-existent. Combine that with the fact that modern streaming services deliver to me an incredible variety of content options and you can see why I’m not eager to spend $100+ on a night at the movies.

But there are certain facets of the experience that aren’t captured by my home theater. It’s not especially large; it’s designed for my small family unit. I couldn’t host a party of even 10 comfortably. But many of our movie (and even television) experiences are inherently social experiences. Even if you watch by yourself, you immediately want to discuss the latest Avengers movie or Game of Thrones episode with your friends or the fandom online. And I know many people like to actually gather to watch those things together; when 30 Rock was on the air, we used to gather every week at a friend’s apartment to watch and laugh together (30 Rock is still one of the greatest shows to ever air on television, by the way. Fight me.)

Okay, that was a lot of preamble. Here’s the actual idea: Small, rent-able movie rooms. Tagline: “The Best Living Room In Town.”

You walk into what used to be a movie theater. Instead of 20 large theaters showing big movies at specific times, that space is now divided into 160 decent-sized “living rooms.” Each one has incredibly comfortable couches and an awesome screen, and is sized for between 10 and 20 people. You rent the rooms by the hour, and you can watch whatever you want. The business has commercial accounts with every streaming service, so you can watch any Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, HBO, Disney or whatever else you want. It also still gets movie licenses, so you can watch the newest releases, too. Super Bowl Sunday probably has some surge pricing, but watch it here – no clean up, no angry spouse! Want to take your kids to see a movie, but they’re a little rambunctious? It’s cool – the rooms are private and sound-proofed, no worries about disturbing other patrons or forcing your kids to sit in one spot for two hours. Want to get together with friends and binge all of Good Omens or Stranger Things in one day? Split the cost of the room and have fun!

A central area has a decent food court, and you can bring your snacks or meals into the rooms – there are tables in there. Pause any time you like for a refill without missing anything – it’s your room! Want to get your Smash Bros. on? Bring your system, we’ll hook it up for you, and you can play on our awesome screen instead of at your mom’s house. Looking for an awesome party idea? Ask us about our Karaoke options!

I’d like to think of this as the experience of “social watching.” When it’s just your friends and family, you can talk if you want to, pause when you need to, be comfortable, and enjoy spending time together. I’d go!

Everyone’s brain is wired a little differently.

We are bombarded all day by a million pieces of sensory input, firing neurons that crash into our mind like artillery fire. For a variety of reasons, no two brains absorb this information in exactly the same way. Some brains get hit with a neuron from the taste buds carrying the sensory input from a bite of broccoli and react with revulsion; others get that same piece of info and jump for joy. Some people can have two drinks every day of their lives and never become an issue, other people go crazy with the first sip. Some people thrive on conflict, other people run screaming from it.

Our brains are imperfect, leaky machines. We have some influence over how our brains react to stimuli, but it’s far from perfect control. A lot of our lives center essentially on three activities – seeking out the good neurons, avoiding the bad ones, and trying to have some impact on which is which.

Knowing this, there is something I will be eternally grateful for. My creator, whatever it might be, has given me many gifts. But none compare to the fact that my brain is wired in such a way as to be utterly overwhelmed by music.

Nothing else compares. Not even close. In my past I’ve been so drunk I couldn’t stand (horrible). I’ve tried drugs (not for a very long time, thankfully). I’ve had my heart broken. I’ve completed marathons. I’ve lost loved ones. Nothing has given me the depth of feeling and altered my mental states like music can. Even the things in my life that have made me truly happy, like the births of my children, made me happy in a serene and joyous way, but it didn’t feel like my mental state was actually altered. It was a rational happiness.

Music isn’t like that. The right song can bring me utter elation or hit me in the chest like a hammer. The right song can make me beat my personal best in physical activities or reduce me to tears. I’m completely at the mercy of music.

I wouldn’t trade it for anything.